almost every doorstep, and polar bear skins and dried fish hung on racks behind the houses. Not far from our temporary lodgings at the Lutheran pastor’s residence, a severed musk ox head stared at the grey sky through clouded, lifeless eyes.
A few decades ago people lived in ‘sod houses’, turfroofed dwellings dug out of the ground, dark and dingy but very well insulated from the winter cold. A few lumps further up the shore are all that remains of them – today everyone lives in wooden or prefabricated modern homes, scattered in rows all around the island.
Nine houses had to be moved during the last big storm, Robert Iyatunguk told me. As ninety-miles-per-hour winds whipped around them, and whole sections of thawed cliff tumbled into the raging sea, the whole community had mobilised to save the dwellings which were closest to the edge. It was dangerous work: not only could a house collapse on the people working under it to jack it up, but the ground itself could give way suddenly beneath them.
‘We lost fifty feet of ground in one night with that storm. We’re in panic mode now because of how much ground we’re losing.’
We crunched down a shallow slope where sandbags were protruding through the snow: the remnants of Shishmaref’s last battle with the sea. All the sea walls had failed, he went on. The water just undercut or washed over them. It seemed like nothing could prevent this loose, gravelly ground from eroding away.
Now the talk was of relocation – something that would have to be agreed by all 600 residents through a community ballot. (It was – over a year after I’d left – in July 2002.) It would cost $50 million, and there was no sign of the state authorities coming up with the cash. But the worst case scenario was no longer that of having to move the village, he said, but that of another big storm whilst they were still living in the danger zone.
Time is running out, Robert emphasised. ‘The wind is getting stronger, the water is getting higher, and it’s noticeable to everybody in town. It just kind of scares you inside your body and makes you wonder exactly when the big one is going to hit.’ And this ‘big storm’ throws a perpetual shadow over the community the longer it stays put: people cast anxious glances over at the horizon, and when a strong wind gets up, those closest to the shore often decamp to sleep at relatives’ houses.
There was an emergency evacuation plan of sorts – something partly within Robert’s responsibility that has given him many sleepless nights. In a few hours a C-130 aircraft could arrive, and evacuate all of Shishmaref’s residents within four return journeys. But could it operate during a storm? And what if the runway began to collapse? ‘If our airport runway gets flooded out and eaten away, there goes our evacuation by plane,’ Robert admitted. ‘Then we’d have to go to the next highest point in town, which would either be the church or the school.’
We stood together under the crumbling cliffs. Robert scuffed the base of it with his boot, and icy sand showered down. Up above us an abandoned house hung precariously over the edge, at least a third of its foundation protruding into thin air. The house next door had toppled over and been reduced to matchwood by the waves.
‘There’s one major storm that we never had,’ Robert Iyatunguk concluded quietly. ‘I’d hate to be here when it hits, but my kids are here, and I’m going to stay here with my kids and my wife’s family and their brothers and sisters for as long as it takes.’
I spent that evening with Clifford Weyiouanna, a fifty-eight-year-old Shishmaref elder, who sat polishing his gun as we spoke. Several snowmachines were parked outside his house, one with a sled on which were stacked three large blocks of ice – clear as glass, and cut from a coastal river to serve as drinking water. Children were playing on the snowdrifts – some piled as high as the houses themselves – and Clifford’s grandchildren ran in and out of the house, banging the door behind them.
‘It’s no good getting old without kids around,’ Clifford chuckled indulgently as one of them whizzed past. He brought out an ‘Eskimo shotgun’ (a bone harpoon which had been used to hunt ducks) and his most prized possession, an intricately-beaded woven belt, so ancient that no one remembered who had made it.
Having lived in the community all his life (bar four years at high school and two in the military ‘hellhole’ of Fort Benning, Georgia, and then Saigon, which he didn’t like to talk about), Clifford Weyiouanna was an authority on the local environment. It was true, he told me, that the permafrost underlying the village was melting, and this was speeding up the erosion. But another factor was just as important – the gradual disappearance of the sea ice.
The sea ice used to lock up the shore for six months of every year, he explained, and so for half the year the eroding power of the waves was banished. Storms could rage all they wanted, but the sandy cliffs would stand. Now that had begun to change.
‘The currents have changed, the ice conditions have changed, and the freeze-up of the Chukchi Sea out here has really changed too. We used to freeze up in the last part of October. This year we didn’t freeze up until Christmas time.’
‘So, how different is it when you’re actually out on the ice?’
‘It’s not as stable. We used to get icebergs from the north many years ago – turquoise blue icebergs – not any more, it’s all young ice now. Thin stuff, only about a foot thick. Right now, the ice on that ocean out there should be, under normal conditions, four foot thick.’
And the animal behaviour was changing too. ‘I think they’re migrating a lot earlier than they used to because of the warming of the ocean. They migrate north in the spring to stay in the cooler waters. That’s the polar bears, the walrus, the spotted seal, the bearded seal, the belugas and the bowhead whales.’ He leaned forward to emphasise the point: ‘Last summer we covered thousands of miles by boat trying to get walrus – there was nothing, except for one boat which found one walrus.’
And then there were the strange new fish. ‘I used to have one in my shed. I was going to give it to a biologist to take a look because it’s not a local fish. The warming of the temperature is bringing some uncommon fish species into the ocean.’
We talked long after midnight. Outside the sun was only just setting, and the kids were as noisy and energetic as ever. No one bothered to order them around: traditional teaching methods are subtle, and Eskimo children are expected to find things out for themselves.
Shishmaref would go on, both Clifford and Robert assured me. If not here, then someplace else further up the coast. But whatever happened, the community would stay together. People here looked after each other – just as the first seal of the hunting season would always be given to an elder. It was the traditional way.
HUSLIA
All over the Alaskan interior people in remote villages are reporting sudden changes, all related to the state’s warming climate: weird animal behaviour, unexpected weather, changing landscape and dying forests. Around Huslia, a small Athabaskan Indian village three hundred kilometres west of Fairbanks, entire lakes have disappeared.
These disappearing lakes sounded a bit too dramatic, and I wasn’t sure I believed it – until I visited the village and saw it happening for myself.
The plane was only an eight-seater, and I was directly behind the pilot. The dials spun as he heaved back the joy-stick, the small craft gaining speed and then bouncing into the air from a side runway at Fairbanks Airport. Soon we were flying over thick forests, which encircled huge ox-bow lakes formed by old river courses. As we cruised at only 900 metres, thin ice clouds scattered the bright sunlight into an ever-present rainbow on the left, whilst on the right, small mountains rose above the treeline, looking almost impossibly smooth under their thick coating of snow.
Huslia was over two hours away, first visible as just a little grey airstrip and a few dozen cabins as we glided in over the forests. As a Native village, Huslia has its own Tribal Council, and one of the officials was waiting to meet us. We loaded our bags onto a sled and rode down into the village on the back of her snowmachine, drawing to a halt outside a log cabin with a large freezer outside the front door and lots of toys